Six Tools for the Post-Email Era
March 15th, 2007 (8:35am) Anne Zelenka 17 Comments
Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr proposes that we might move beyond email some day:
I am starting to think that there may be such a thing as a post-email era, a time when we have forgotten about the entire concept of an Inbox, when there’s no such thing as catching up, and when more of our time and energy can be used in a more productive fashion.
Could we really get beyond email? It just might happen: younger people don’t have the dedication to email that baby boomers and gen Xers do. Social media researcher danah boyd considers email dead “in the sense that it is not longer a site of deep emotional passion. People still have accounts, just like they still have mailboxes. But their place for sociable communication is elsewhere.” Elsewhere these days is often text messages or instant messaging. Though those might represent mainly social communication for people in their teens and early twenties, their passionate use is bound to change the way professional communication takes place too.
We can see hints of the post-email era in tools that are under development or available right now. Let’s let these tools suggest to us how we might move beyond email as a good enough collaboration and communication tool.
1. Twitter microblogger. The current darling of the blogosphere allows for broadcast messages to your followers in answer to the question “what are you doing right now?” You send messages from the web, SMS, IM, or a desktop client and your followers receive them in the way that suits them at that time (or not at all). Twitter can replace social email like “how are you?” and “what’s going on?” at the same time it provides detailed information about what a person is doing at a particular time. If a colleague has just twittered “surfing the web” you know it might be a good time to ping them about whatever you need to discuss with them. It makes instant messaging more convenient and effective… and instant messaging is better for collaboration than email.
2. Trillian Astra unified instant messaging or other IM aggregator. We all have buddies using different instant messaging networks so it makes sense to use a unified instant messaging client like Trillian (Windows), Gaim (Linux/Unix), Adium (Mac OS X), or Meebo (Web). Astra, the next generation of the Trillian IM aggregator now under development, will have a bunch of cool new features, including a web-based profile page that can inform everyone of where you are and what you’re up to.
3. Vox blogging. Though Vox, the latest hosted blogging service from SixApart, is aimed more at personal than professional use, the breakthrough it offers to help us move away from email is very fine-grained access control. This makes it feasible for use in sharing things like photos that you don’t want everyone to see. I get email after email with photo attachments in my personal inbox. I’m looking forward to the day when everyone has their own access-controlled blog to share their photos and thoughts.
4. Tubes. Tubes provides peer-to-peer file sharing and synchronization among groups of friends, families, or colleagues without email as an intermediary. It’s Windows only right now, so not so much a solution as the idea of one for many groups. But it could provide an alternative means to share files for people who don’t want a web page as an intermediary (as with Vox).
5. Renkoo for event planning. Renkoo uses email to drive more synchronous discussion of event plans, which could be a real boon to those who suffer from the endless back and forth about what time and where to meet. It uses Comet technology to provide an instant messaging like conversation. Plany.pus offers a similar ad hoc event planning tool.
6. GMail’s RSS feeds. For mailing lists that you rarely reply to, it makes sense to read the messages as RSS feeds. GMail makes this pretty easy because it provides feeds by label. Just set up a filter to label mailing list emails, then subscribe to the feed in a feed reader that supports authentication. Or you can put your user ID and password into the feed address… but careful that you don’t make your feed subscriptions public.
There are tons of other tools that can be used to get us out of email like wikis, online office suites, even your phone. The harder part will be convincing people to do it.
What do you think about the feasibility of a post-email era? Are you trying to move some traffic out of your inbox and into different channels and tools?
17 Comments Post your own comment
Yan says: March 15th, 2007 10:16am
Hey there thanks for mentioning Planypus. I’d just like to point out unlike Renkoo, Planypus is a truly collaborative way to make plans. It takes about ten seconds to suggest an idea and then have your friends fill in all the details. Think of it as a combination of live chat, wiki, and voting. It’s great for planning a night out, or even something involved like a vacation with a bunch of your friends contributing to making the plans instead of you having to come up with all the details. Check it out!
Lauren says: March 15th, 2007 11:57am
I have been using Tubes since it launched in Beta back in January. It is an awesome way for me to send my work stuff home. So I have a tube on my office computer and I save all my work in there and then I have a tube on my home computer. At the end of the day - I drag and drop my files into the tube and when I get home, they are automatically there! I used to have to send myself 14 emails!! This is so much better! Thanks for mentioning it and I hope others will use it as well. http://www.tubesnow.com. They just had a product release and the app has new features.
Shikash says: March 15th, 2007 12:46pm
Great theme to discuss given how social habits change. I don’t think the analysis lives up to the discussion though. Its probably quite difficult to integrate isolated technologies developed for totally different purposes into a unified predictor of dominant future communication methods. Of the technologies discussed, text messaging seems to be one that has a great deal of credibility and usage - but only if one is willing to look at the denizens of mobile users outside the US. In the US pricing for personal communication will likely be a big impediment to a single dominant alternative emerging to email or other established communication methods at least for the near future.
Rick O says: March 15th, 2007 1:02pm
This may come off sounding like a flame, but I assure you that’s not how I intend it.
While I am amused but the current “social networking” trend … has anyone stopped to think about the difference between social networking and communicating? At least in my world, communication implies valuable and quantifiable data exchange, not just the niceties and protocol. Otherwise, we’re back to high-chinned aristocratic nods as wee pass eachother in the streets.
To use the most prevalent (and reviled?) example, while I would say that myspace may be good for networking, I would in no way ever associate it with communication. Similarly, I would say that email, while it can be used for networking, is more of a communication tool. (Indeed, how many studies have shown that email actually distances people from each other and is dissociative?)
Texting and IM can straddle the line depending on who is using them and how. But where is the communication part of Twitter? What are you learning? There’s more to communicating than “hey, how are you?” at the watercooler.
Different tools for different jobs.
Anne Zelenka says: March 15th, 2007 1:31pm
Rick O: as I mentioned in the article, Twitter is good for knowing whether your virtual colleagues are reachable or not–whether you can use IM to ask them something or whether they are too busy with something else. I’ve also used Twitter to ask a bunch of people something at once. People who don’t know don’t have to answer… people who do can send me an @ message or a direct message to help out.
Shikash: indeed text messaging should play an important part in moving away from the email channel… but the carrier pricing makes it difficult right now. Did you see GigaOM’s article on free text messaging services?
Note I said these tools give hints of the future, not “a unified predictor of dominant future communication methods” as you put it. In fact, I’d question whether there is going to be anything as dominant as email has been… will future generations be more willing to use as Rick O calls them “different tools for different jobs”: wikis for document collaboration, photo blogs for sharing pictures, IM for quick questions, event planning services for scheduling telecons? Or will we keep defaulting to email?
Shikash says: March 15th, 2007 1:49pm
Thanks for your follow-up Anne! Goes to make your point that blogs do work :)
It would be great to attempt to understand why email did become so ubiquitous. Takeaways from that would probably signal what methods will become entrenched near term. I do admire the fact that you broached a topic that forced me to think about a paradigm shift. Thanks for pointing out Om’s article - I’ll definitely check that out.
TMapic says: March 15th, 2007 2:17pm
I agree - IM is overtaking email, but you still need a way to get your stuff from friends and to your other computers easily. I’m using Tubes right now when someone drops in something on their end of a tube, I get notified silently and I can have it pushed to me without taking action or review what it is and grab it on demand. Really effective way to stay in touch without using email (saw their video on the site and they do say you can drag your gmail and Outlook mail into a tube to sync) Cool - desktop to desktop email without using email.
Anne Zelenka says: March 15th, 2007 2:38pm
Shikash - yes, this is the ideal for blogging — your comment helped me clarify in my own mind that the direction may be to more fragmented communications mechanisms instead of the unified email channel. And it is interesting to wonder just why email is so ubiquitous.
Here’s the post from GigaOM on free text messaging services:
http://gigaom.com/2007/03/12/free-sms/
tmapic: I haven’t tried Pipes yet, but it seems really useful. Thanks for sharing your experiences.
Renkoo and the Post-Email Era « Renkoo Blog says: March 15th, 2007 3:30pm
[...] and the Post-Email Era Anne Zelenka of Web Worker Daily writes: Renkoo uses email to drive more synchronous discussion of event plans, which could be a real boon [...]
No man is an iland says: March 16th, 2007 1:22am
Tools for the post-email era
…Email use for collaboration and personal correspondence may decline, but that does not necessarily mean email marketing follows suit…
Alex says: March 16th, 2007 10:03am
I believe, that when talking about email being overtaken as a communication tool, it is important to distinguish what is the purpose for the comunication and what kind of communication is it. If it is a quick conversation, there is nothing better than to IM, if you would like a more formal or uninterrupted communication, then email is still king. However, when trying to communicate and exchange aggregate, quantify, or learn (some of the topic Rick O mentioned) it is hard to do with email, let alone IM. Why is it more benefitial to use some of the services you mentioned above? Because they help with not only communication, but also aggregation and understanding and quantifying the information. An example would be conversation, as easy as it s to talk to someone, many times its easier and better to show a picture to assist your story. When it comes to event planning, Anne, you asked if email would ever be overcome? As we all know its hard to agrregate responses after even 3-4 people reply with different preferences to your suggestions. Try planning a party and see how hard it is to sift through the email threads looking for what Josh wants to bring or where Michelle wants to go. For that exact reason we created Planypus, and we firmly believe that with Planypus we are able to better and more efficiently communicate than with email or IM any day.
rick gregory says: March 16th, 2007 10:58am
Email became dominant for a couple of basic reasons i think:
1) Universality. Unlike IM social networking sites or even twitter, I could use any email provider and program. Addresses took care of this - I was someone@somewhere.com. You didn’t have to be on somewhere.com, somewhere.com didn’t require you to signup with them to email me. No profiles or anything - just compose a message, address it to me and send. Need to send me a file? Just attach it.
This lead to a another flavor of universality - at some point, you could count on everyone having email. One group of my friends used to plan things over the phone… then most people got email - and the last hold out who didn’t see why she needed a computer got one just for email… because the rest of us had email and that’s where the action was moving.
These two lead to the third kind of universality - you could use email to do a lot of different things… send contracts back and forth with the lawyers, arrange drinks with a friend, send a love note to your boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse… what ever. It was (and is) like computers themselves - a general purpose tool that could be molded to the user’s desires and needs.
IM took off because it shares many of the same strengths and adds useful things like presence indicators and because it feels better for quick conversations.
fragmented, specialized services try to turn all of this on its head - can I use Renkoo/Planypus etc without having everyone signed up? Twitter is fun… but unless I can get some number of my friends and colleagues signed up it’s not that useful to me.
I think Stowe Boyd’s right - the intelligence needs to move to the edge, to the individual with lightweight means to connect us and let us interact in a myriad of ways.
Yan says: March 16th, 2007 12:55pm
Rick,
I won’t speak for Renkoo but on Planypus if you send the invitation to your friends no one has to sign up. They get the full event details in the email and they can rsvp from the email or even add it to their google calendar, facebook ,etc. If they do want to click through to the site, by all means they can do that and they will never be required to sign up!
This is why planypus is so useful. In a group of ten people if you send out a planypus saying let’s go out to dinner, five people might give you suggestions about where to go ad the other five might not really care, so it works both ways. Eitehr way you as the organizer benefit from having other people help you plan it, and all your friends benefit from not getting cc-ed on a crazy reply-all email thread that usually ensues when these things are planned by email.
Another important aspect of these new technologies is choice of notification. With planypus I can use email, rss, sms, gcal, facebook, twitter (launching soon), all of these things as tie in points so that I don’t have to go to the site to get notified…this is a big key. A lot of the old school technologies as well as some of the new ones still make you do silly things like click through to the site to get details. This is a thing of the past because people are using aggregators, mobile technologies, etc, so it’s silly to expect them to come to your site, and we don’t. We make it as easy as possible for you to get your event information and export it anywhere you like!
Web Worker Daily » Blog Archive Six Tools for the Post-Email Era « : Hjalið á truth.is says: March 17th, 2007 3:45pm
[...] Web Worker Daily » Blog Archive Six Tools for the Post-Email Era « [...]
Ray Johnson says: March 17th, 2007 4:04pm
I think the best tool for the “post e-mail era” is undoubtedly Diigo, which allows you to share sites you’ve bookmarked, with passages you find significant highlighted, and your own notes. You can also forward a link, with highlights and notes, to others by e-mail, if you prefer, or you can post all this information to your blog. And those are just the key points of what their integrated tools can help you do.
For two recent reviews that explain some of the power of Diigo, see: Under the Radar: Self Optimize and Adapt… and Intelligent Agent: Social Bookmarking for Enterprise Knowledge Management, which reviews several sites, including Diigo.
Monica says: April 6th, 2007 12:24am
I am not a fan of renkoo.. I think the best tool for for event planning is setdot.
I was able to literally creat a super stylish event in under a minute. The look of the invites is very well done. I recently hosted a party for a 100 people easily and quickly. They have super nice mapping capabilities, great messaging. I love the way the address book and guest lists are organized.
The themes are very well done. Very easy and super intuitive to use. I didn’t spend time figuring out how things worked or where certain features lay. Everything was easy to find and flowed correctly.
Overall very good site. Goodbye evite/ renkoo/ skobee
Web Worker Daily » Blog Archive A CIO Revolutionizes the Rules of Email « says: May 1st, 2007 5:49am
[...] our relationship to email. In March, Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr called hopefully for a post-email era. Last week we explored the concept of email bankruptcy, where you abandon the project of getting [...]